Best Asana Alternatives (2026)
Asana cut its free plan to 2 users in late 2025 and moved time tracking to the $24.99 tier. Here are the alternatives — including the free one — with each tool's own user complaints on the record.
Coordinator
OUR PICK — obviously, it's ours. Judge the reasoning:Coordinator is free with unlimited users and no usage caps — not a free tier, the whole product — and the project management features sit inside one system with real accounting, projects, scheduling, client records and a cross-company network. Payments run on your own Stripe, PayPal or Wise with zero platform cut. The honest limitations: it's web-only today (no native mobile apps yet), and it won't match every specialist's deepest niche feature — each entry below notes where the specialist still wins.
- Free — every feature, every seat, forever
- No usage meters: unlimited invoices, submissions, contacts, hours
- One system: the money, the work and the client connect
- Your own payment rails; we never touch funds
Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.
Asana
Free (2 users); ~$11–$25/user/moThe best-known work management platform — polished, mature, and priced per user per month.
Asana's rules engine, forms-to-workflow routing and 200+ integrations are mature. Complex multi-team automation is its home turf.
The free plan got cut to 2 users with barely any warning
Trello
Free (10 boards); ~$5–$10/user/moThe kanban original — simple shared boards, now part of Atlassian, priced per user for anything beyond the basics.
If all you genuinely need is a shared list of cards, Trello's free tier is hard to argue with — there's less to learn because there's less there.
Free workspaces over the collaborator cap went view-only
ClickUp
Free (60MB storage, key views trial-only); ~$7–$12/user/moThe everything-app of project management — docs, goals, whiteboards and tasks, priced per user.
Whiteboards, mind maps, goals, sprints, native chat — if you want one canvas for every conceivable artifact, ClickUp's catalog is bigger.
Guests silently converted to paid seats — our bill jumped overnight
monday.com
Free (2 seats); ~$9–$24/seat/mo, 3-seat minimumColorful, board-based work management with strong marketing — priced per seat, sold in seat bundles.
monday's dashboards, timeline views and automation recipes are slick and demo beautifully — visual reporting across many boards is a strength.
Three-seat minimum — I'm one person paying for three
Basecamp
Flat tiers ~$25–$299/moThe calm, opinionated project tool from 37signals — famous for flat pricing and free client access.
Basecamp's Hill Charts and message boards are genuinely original, and 37signals' focus is a feature in itself.
No subtasks, no custom fields, no kanban — you outgrow it
Notion
Free (personal); ~$10–$20/user/mo for teamsThe build-anything workspace — docs, wikis and databases that many small teams bend into a project tracker.
As a knowledge base — handbooks, meeting notes, internal docs — Notion is the category leader, and its flexibility there is the point.
AI now requires the $20/user Business plan
Jira
Free ≤10 users; ~$8–$15/user/moAtlassian's issue tracker — the enterprise dev standard, famous for power and for needing an administrator.
Sprints, backlogs, releases and deep GitHub/Bitbucket integration — if you ship code at scale, Jira (or Linear) is purpose-built for it.
Configuring it takes a dedicated admin
Wrike
Free (limited); ~$10–$25/user/mo, quote-only aboveEnterprise work management for marketing teams and PMOs — powerful, and priced like it.
Capacity planning, workload balancing and BI-grade dashboards across hundreds of people are Wrike's home turf.
Seats come in bands — we pay for users we don't have
Smartsheet
Free (limited); ~$9–$19/Member/moSpreadsheet-shaped work management for ops teams — now private-equity-owned, with per-Member pricing.
If your whole team thinks in rows and formulas, Smartsheet's on-ramp is genuinely gentle.
Cross-sheet references cap out and formulas crawl at scale
Airtable
Free (1K records); ~$20–$45/seat/moThe flexible database-builder teams turn into trackers and lightweight apps — priced per editor seat.
For a custom dataset that isn't jobs/clients/money — a content calendar, a research library — Airtable's build-anything flexibility wins.
A colleague who edits one field a week needs a $20 seat
Teamwork.com
Free ≤5 users; ~$11–$20/user/mo (minimums apply)Agency-focused project management with time and billing — priced per user with plan minimums.
Retainer burn-down views, billable utilization targets and agency onboarding content are deep — Teamwork has served agencies for 15+ years.
The advertised price isn't the price an agency actually needs
Microsoft Project & Planner
Planner plans ~$10–$55/user/mo; desktop $680–$1,130The classic enterprise scheduler, mid-transition: Project for the web retired, Project Online retiring, Planner absorbing both.
Critical path, resource leveling, baselines and earned value for dependency-heavy programs — construction and engineering PMOs genuinely need this, and Coordinator doesn't attempt it.
Project for the web is dead, Project Online dies next — and we have to migrate again
Linear
Free (250 issues); ~$10–$16/user/moThe fast, opinionated issue tracker startups love — built for product and engineering teams.
Cycles, triage, GitHub-native flow, agent-driven coding sessions — if your product is code, use Linear for the code.
Reporting is too thin for anything beyond the sprint
Celoxis
~$25–$45/user/mo, 5-user minimumAll-in-one project portfolio management for mid-market PMOs — strong reporting, priced per user with a 5-user minimum.
Board-ready custom dashboards and what-if capacity planning across a project portfolio are Celoxis's specialty.
The interface feels dated and overwhelming
Todoist
Free (5 projects); ~$5–$8/user/moThe veteran cross-platform to-do app — beloved capture, recently pricier, thin for teams.
'Every other Tuesday at 3' typed into Todoist just works — its quick-add is still the best in class, and Coordinator doesn't match that parsing.
The December 2025 price hike — 40% on monthly Pro
TickTick
Free (limited); ~$36/yr PremiumThe tasks-plus-calendar-plus-habits app — cheap, capable, personal-scale.
For personal-productivity ritual — streaks, focus timers, an Eisenhower matrix — TickTick is delightful and Coordinator doesn't compete.
The calendar view is the whole point and it's paywalled
Google Tasks
FreeThe free checklist inside Gmail and Calendar — simple to a fault.
It's already in your Gmail. For a pure personal checklist with no ambitions, that convenience is unbeatable.
No shared lists — literally unusable with another person
Things 3
One-time ~$80 across Apple devicesThe beautiful Apple-only task manager — one-time purchase, zero collaboration.
As a single-player Apple experience, Things' design is genuinely unmatched, and its one-time price is honorable.
Apple-only — my work laptop is Windows
Zoho Projects
Free (3 projects); ~$4–$10/user/moThe budget project tool of the Zoho suite — deep features, dated UX, per-user pricing.
Interactive Gantt, dependencies and critical path at $5/user is real value Coordinator's stage model doesn't replicate.
The UI feels dated and takes weeks to learn
Rankings reflect what's available free and each product's recurring user feedback from public reviews. Competitor pricing approximate, from published plans as of August 2026. Yes, we ranked ourselves first — the reasoning is on the card, and every competitor link above includes the case against us too.
Skip to the free one
Trying it costs exactly as much as reading another roundup.
Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.